Missouri Williams’ The Vivisectors sinks prestige into dread

In Missouri Williams’ second novel, The Vivisectors, prestige and belonging don’t soothe anyone—they sharpen Agathe’s detachment into something almost predatory. The result is a city where flora takes over the cracks, and a story that treats unlikability as a

The first twenty pages of Missouri Williams’ The Vivisectors land like a dare. Agathe’s world doesn’t ease you in; it tightens around you—an indifferent start that feels, sentence by sentence, calibrated to make dread stick.

The novel begins with an attempt at suicide that Agathe’s mother fails to complete. It’s the kind of opening that changes how you read everything that follows. Agathe works as a research assistant for one of the academic professors at the unnamed university—someone she first secretly and later openly hates. She lives with her uncle in a vegetation-infested town. Her father considers her a failure. Once a week, she’s forced to visit her immobile mother. Few words are spent on feelings. and yet Williams builds Agathe’s aura from the inside out. crafting an emotional silence that isn’t absence so much as an atmosphere.

Agathe presents herself as an “excellent listener because she has never said anything back.” She reads voraciously. not picky. and takes in the world through her uncle’s massive library. Even with a family of prominent editors behind her. she appears aloof to the privileges surrounding her—dreamless. ambitionless. and positioned at an odd remove from what should. in any simpler story. feel like safety.

Then the city itself starts to look like a symptom. Dark sky hangs over a damp town overgrown with giant, rapidly spreading flora. Dread and porous despair coil around Williams’ characters like hot glue—binding them not through affection but through psychological malice. On the verge of collapse. “delapidated museums” rot through their rows of paintings. empty streets have been handed over to plant and animal life. and a tree grows through two floors of an old department store. Beneath Agathe’s feet, even the asphalt bulges. “There were weeds everywhere.”.

Williams uses the menace of flora as more than scenery. It becomes a metaphorical substance for moral decline. The pace turns sharply when Agathe orchestrates a fake friendship with a disgraced student named Adam. From there, she’s caught in a shitstorm of unfamiliar emotions. They rise violently—like weeds jutting through cracked pavement—and begin to consume her. Within the plagued town, she starts to fall into pieces no glue gun could ever repair. By the end. her crippled love-hate tempest spins out of control. and the question Williams leaves hanging is the most unsettling kind: is it wreckage. or redemption?. How could anyone really know?.

What makes the book sting is how controlled the prose feels while still refusing comfort. Williams’ sentences are smooth yet calibrated to crack open the psychological tantrums of outsiders. Her writing folds itself into a legacy associated with Clarice Lispector, Anna Kavan, Rachel Kushner, and Ottessa Moshfegh. The novel seems built for readers who can handle the kind of intimacy that doesn’t offer relief.

Part of that is deliberate. In an interview about The Vivisectors, Williams describes her approach as solving a puzzle. She says the writing process was very controlled, with sentences occupying her attention for days. She wanted the prose to seem smooth on the surface—ordered and clean. “nothing much to catch the eye”—while the book itself would still be bright and jagged and withholding. She aimed for writing that could feel light and reflective but secretly weighty. with many things hidden from both the narrator and the reader. She also describes her process as non-linear. focused on finding connections between different aspects of character and story. thinking about how one image might rebound on another. and being surprised by what she discovered.

Agathe’s detachment is also treated as something actively constructed, not merely inherited. Williams says she wanted to write someone completely blind to their own inner reality but who aggressively believes otherwise—someone whose self-interpretation is contradicted by her actions and perceptions. Agathe can feel receptive and fully vivid in her experience. even as she insists on a version of herself that doesn’t match what she does.

The background behind the novel’s landscape. too. is tied to a specific kind of moisture—cultural as well as atmospheric. Williams says that while writing she was living across multiple cities: London, Prague, Brussels, Chicago, and traveling to many others. But she describes the damp and decline as “very post-Brexit England. ” with crumbling. ailing infrastructure and a generalized sense of depression paired with clinging to an image of a past of supremacy. Still, she stresses

that nothing in The Vivisectors should be definitively traceable to anything in the real world. She wanted each place and character to gesture in many directions at once. And she frames the political world of the book not as nations but as competing city states. drawing from Ancient Greece and the warring Italian city states of the medieval period. even as empire discourses are “buried” there too. In her version of the story. the power

of a dominant city is waning. compounded by encroachments of the natural world.

The novel’s most vivid objects arrive with the same sensibility. Williams says she loved the detail of the red tram. and confirms it was partly inspired by the old trams in Prague. She also says she’s always afraid of getting run over—an admission that. for all its smallness. lands in the same emotional register as her larger work: unease treated as everyday fact.

Critics have noticed the book’s coldness. Kirkus described her writing as “heir to writers like Ottessa Moshfegh. ” focusing on female protagonists marked by passivity and icy detestation of society that teeters on the brink of nihilism. When asked what she thought of comparisons like that. Williams points to the novel’s self-conscious placement within such a tradition—especially in the chapter where the schoolmaster rants about the state of contemporary literature and what he sees as

bloodless first-person narrators. She says she agrees with the argument in that passage: that the mode of narrative is responding to conditions of the time. including an emptying out of the present by the movement of attention online. She also says she wanted after The Doloriad to try something constrained to a single voice and mind. and further hemmed in by the nature of the character doing the perceiving—while undermining and almost parodying that perspective

through the inclusion of absurdist elements. She names Harriet Armstrong’s To Rest Our Minds and Bodies as a recent read she felt kinship with. calling it an “ultimate realization” of an exaggerated Beckettian version of that form.

For Williams, the question isn’t whether Agathe should be likable. It’s what literature is willing to carry.

“I think literature needs to preserve its relationship to unlikability, to difficult and upsetting things,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense to me to make the kind of moral demand of a book that one might make of a person. that it should treat its characters well. that it should only depict ‘good’ or acceptable things.”.

Her own work sits in that same refusal. Williams is the author of The Doloriad. which won the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. and was named a best book of 2022 by Vulture. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta, and The Drift. Vulture has blurred The Vivisectors as one of the most anticipated books of 2026.

The novel’s ending doesn’t soften the blow. Williams says she “enjoyed the novel’s unexpected, restless ending,” describing that Agathe finishes what her mother intended. She says she knew what she wanted to happen, but not how she’d get there. In the end. she says. what Agathe does—however outrageous—feels like part of her growth because she finally does something for another person. “however contra the laws of society.” She adds that Agathe respects her mother’s desire to author her own ending.

Even her thoughts on other art forms carry the same temperature. She says beyond writing. she was reminded of Lucrecia Martel’s film The Headless Woman. about Vero. a middle-aged dentist who enters a peculiar psychological state after a car accident and tries to determine whether she has killed someone. Williams says she wanted to make films long before she wanted to write books. and that she hopes one day she will. She mentions co-editing the film journal Another Gaze. working with writers and learning how film criticism teaches you to write visually. She also says she still thinks about The Headless Woman and found it so upsetting.

As for her own life in Prague. Williams says she studied and lived there for seven years. then eventually became fed up with the city. Returning made her fall in love with it again. She’s lived there longer now than anywhere else; it feels like home. She loves how green and vibrant Prague is. and the torrential summer rains. and she ties that sense of everything growing rampantly—present in both her novels—to her time in the city.

The Vivisectors is out now.

Missouri Williams The Vivisectors arts literature fiction book review Clarice Lispector Anna Kavan Rachel Kushner Ottessa Moshfegh Lucrecia Martel The Headless Woman Prague trams post-Brexit England flora metaphor unlikability